Monday, 30 March 2015

As we're going through the story board, a piece of paper is then folded into a paper plane. We planned for it to fly, but we had no idea how we were going to make that happen without difficulties. With an easy research, we've conducted an experiment - which worked out - with pieces of string attached at every point of the plane so our hand won't be in the animation, but it will look like it's flying. The string is barely visible in the video.

At this point we've animated into our next sequence, texture. We are making a more detailed storyboard which is soon going to be on this blog, but at the moment we're still experiencing issues when it comes to lighting.

Two different scenes with two different lighting problems (Too light and too dark)

Before we're moving onto Texture - our next element of design we'll be portraying - we're testing out Green screen. We have made a very makeshift set of green paper to help with this, and we're relying on our editor to figure out what programs can be used to make the green screen work functionally, and make what seems to be a paper plane flying past different textures. We have a scene where we've tried it out. We'll do a comparison and see if anything has changed through the green screen.

So at the moment we're exploring software that will help us with green screen. If we can't find any software, we'll go back to originally making the paper plane flying across real materials.

Tuesday, 24 March 2015

The three different shapes we chose were the triangle and cube, the two most distinct shapes we can easily see when it comes to SHAPE, through the Elements of Design. The triangle is then flattened and re-morphed into a cube.

Our first frames are held with the first sequence of our story board, the clay-mation. A pink clay ball appears out of the wall and morphs into two different shapes. However we have expected to see mistakes.

Shadows here are a problem. Because the light behind us casts shadows behind the people who are taking the pictures, the frames can flash with different shadows and errors. We might fix this, or use this sequence as a test run and move up to the Photographic rooms. We are still deciding, however, and we've continued onto the next sequences.

At this point the clay rolls into the middle of the table, and starts morphing into shapes.

Because Hue Animation only has a select few of compatible cameras to use, unfortunately the Nikon D3100 is not compatible with the software.

Instead of hooking the camera to the computer directly, we will be individually taking the photos frame by frame as usual, and then be importing these photos into the computer as normal.

We have also decided where our first set will be held, which is in the back of the Digital Technology room. However, we might switch to the Photography rooms upstairs to have a better background with proper light and no distinct shadows.

Tuesday, 17 March 2015

Dragon Frame software is expensive (295$) and our group will most likely not be using this software due to its surreal price and complexity.

Hue Animation

Hue Animation is simple and quite easy to use. Onion skinning is supported, which means that we can easily make a Stop Motion animation using this software. We will most likely be using this software to make our animation.

iStopMotion

This software is somewhat similar towards Hue Animation, except this software doesn't support many cameras, but can be used as an app on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices.

Pencil 2D

This software allows the use of digital animation, as well as facial editing plus character animation. We might be using this to add more simplicity towards our animation as it's quite easy to use. But, we will only use this if we have enough time to complete the animation however.

and Cinema 4D

Cinema 4D supports almost all sorts of animation, but the complexity towards the studio may take some time to get used too.

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For now we've decided to use Hue Animation, as it looks easy to use and it seems to support a camera we already have. We have started to make a more in-depth storyboard, and once that is finished we will immediately start gathering the objects we need for our stop motion animation.

Sunday, 15 March 2015

As a story board, we've gathered a very simplistic draft of what kind of animation we wanted to use. We might arrange it differently during the process, but it is possible we might keep some of these ideas in the animation as a basis.

Here are some ideas:

Elements:

Colour - Bits of coloured paper being spread across a surface, and then folded into a ball
Line - Whiteboard, a worm or simple line traveling across a whiteboard
Shape - Claymation, morphing clay into strange and common shapes
Size - Paper turning into clay, which gets larger as a size comparison
Space - Marker falls off whiteboard and rolls to paper, where a circle on the paper shows different kinds of space e.g. negative space and a circle getting smaller in perspective.
Value - Pencil draws on paper, showing shading, dark and light areas.
Texture - Paper, folding into a paper plane, perhaps flying into different textures such as walls and cement, and refolds into paper.

In order through animation:
Shape
Texture
Value
Line
Space
Size
Colour

Tuesday, 10 March 2015

Week 7: Planning and the beginning of StoryboardWeek 8: Animating and regular posts on BlogWeek 9: Animating and regular posts on BlogWeek 10 (final week of Term 1): Animating final scenes, blog posts, editing and compressing, and music composition.

Many points are still needed to be added, but judging on how much time is needed we have quickly decided to use Stop Motion as our basis for animation and our project on Elements of Design. If we were to use 3D animation, it would certainly keep us awake at night trying to learn how to use new software we are not entirely used to.

Wednesday, 4 March 2015

Using www.lynda.com , We've been doing an active investigation on what software we should be using in making an animation.

Due to the surreal number of videos on this site, my group and I had to decide on what kind of animation we wanted to do, and after a minute we had decided to accept Stop Motion as our basis for the animation. Looking into Digital animation looks extremely complicated and buying software that allows this kind of animation. Stop Motion seems simple, but we'll look through other types of animation later.